The present invention relates to mobile printing and, more particularly, to preventing unauthorized access to print jobs sent to printers from mobile devices remote from the printers.
Mobile printing systems allow a user to send a print job to a printer from a mobile device remote from the printer. For example, a salesperson who is on the road for several days may send a print job to a printer at the corporate office from his or her tablet computer or smart phone, with the idea of picking-up the printed document upon his or her return to the office. However, if the print job is printed before the user returns to the printer, sensitive data may be compromised and/or the printed document may be discarded. On the other hand, if the print job is left in the job queue while awaiting the user's return, it may be canceled by another user.
To avoid these problems, some mobile printing systems assign remotely submitted print jobs a unique job identifier and require the user who sent the print job to input the job identifier, either on the mobile device or the printer's front panel, to unlock the print job before it can be printed or canceled. While these systems prevent unauthorized access to remotely submitted print jobs, they require users to remember the job identifiers. This can be taxing on users who have been on travel for a long time or remotely submitted numerous print jobs.
An alternative system that relieves users of the burden to remember job identifiers assigns each remotely submitted print job a unique job identifier and encodes the job identifier into a unique barcode. When the user who remotely submitted the print job returns to the printer, the user scrolls through a list of print jobs on the printer's front panel display screen. Each record in the list provides details of a print job along with the barcode for the print job. When the user locates his or her print job in the list, the user images the barcode for the print job using a camera on the user's mobile device. The mobile device then decodes the barcode to reveal the job identifier of the print job and sends the job identifier to the printer to unlock the print job. While this alternative system does not require the user to remember job identifiers, it does require the printer firmware to generate, manage and display a unique barcode for each remotely submitted print job. Moreover, it requires the user to scroll through a list of print jobs on the printer's front panel display screen to find and photograph the barcode for his or her print job. Additionally, if the user has remotely submitted multiple print jobs to the printer, the user must separately locate and photograph the barcode for each print job.